


WARNING!

by teenuviel1227



Category: Day6 (Band)
Genre: F/M, Jager Pilot!YoungK, M/M, Pacific Rim AU, Plot-Driven, soft smut
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-19
Updated: 2019-04-20
Packaged: 2020-01-16 13:24:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,756
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18522436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/teenuviel1227/pseuds/teenuviel1227
Summary: Pacific Rim AU where Brian Kang is the best jager pilot the world’s got and mankind’s one hope against a rising threat. Except since losing his bestfriend and co-pilot, he refuses to try drifting with anyone else again. Until now.





	1. It’s Dangerous, Starting From Your Eyes

“Brave of you to be here, I’ll give you that.” 

I blink. 

Brian Kang puts the helmet on and I watch his profile catch the light, watch his stance as he puts his foot on the jager’s control pad. Impeccable of course: shoulders squared, jaw set. He’s wearing his jager pilot’s uniform: black and green leather with a dragon emblazoned on the back.

I take a deep breath, lock the strap under my chin.  _ Don’t let him see you sweat. _

“Well. You only live once and all that.” 

Brian smirks and my stomach does a lurching thing it hasn’t done since the first time I nose-dived a plane into the eye of a hurricane ten years ago. 

“You don’t know what you’re asking to live through.”

I frown. “Thanks for the encouragement.”

Brian opens his mouth to say something but the comms buzz and Sungjin’s voice comes in through the speakers.

“Kang, you ready?”

“Would it make a difference if I said no?” Brian rolls his eyes but clicks the helmet strap into place. 

Sungjin raises an eyebrow at me through the glass of the control panel.

"Captain?"

I nod. “I’m ready.”

Sungjin hits a red button and suddenly, everything is a pale, blinding light.

  
  


Fine. So maybe I’m a masochist. 

But here’s the thing about Colonel Park Sungjin--when he asks you to do something, he’s never really  _ asking.  _ So when he said,  _ I need someone to drift with Brian Kang, are you up to it, Captain,  _ the only answer possible was the one I gave, which was, to be exact:  _ Of course, Sir. Who do you think you’re talking to?  _

As for that question, he probably thought he was talking to well, me: youngest cadet to make it to flight Captain since well, Park Sungjin himself. The thing he probably  _ didn’t  _ know is that I’m not quite sure how I got here. I mean sure, I know my way around planes and around the single-pilot rovers, but that’s not really something  _ I  _ can be credited with. Not when I grew up people like Wonpil and Dowoon, the three of us the musketeers of the southern scrap yards and junk shops. When you grow up the way we did, with nothing to lose out there on the dunes, you just kind of ride whatever shit you throw together and race the piece of junk to feel alive. Riding fast, going hard, that was what united the three of us until Sungjin found us.

So the question who Sungjin thought he was tlaking to and who he was  _ actually _ talking to have very different answers.

See, who I actually  _ am _ is scared shitless of even attempting to drift with Brian Kang--because  _ everyone  _ knows about Brian Kang. Lieutenant Colonel Kang, Golden Boy of the Versus Kaiju 1 Project, flew in from Canada to South Korea right before the northern coast collapsed, closing off all contact with the western side of the world. There are people like me, Dowoon, Wonpil, and Sungjin who fly because we grew up flying. But Brian is different. 

Brian is like flight  _ royalty. _

His parents built the first two-pilot jager, performed the first drift, back when everything was analogue: no safety of being jolted out of the drift without electrocution, no guarantee of not losing all your memory, no promises about not driving the other person insane by pouring a lifetime of emotion, memories, and fucked up cognitive patterns into their brains--they took that risk  _ and  _ they succeeded.

So, really only an idiot would say no to a test-drift with Brian Kang.

But of course, there’s the thing everyone knows but no one talks about: Brian Kang pilots the Jane Danger alone because when the border collapsed he was riding in the Tyson Tide with his partner and and the kaiju came up and out of nowhere, tore the Tyson in half. He lost his partner  _ while they were in-drift.  _ Another first that Kang has to his name: the first person to survive  _ that _ .

So really, only an idiot would say yes to a test-drift with Brian Kang.

And that idiot is me.

Because as soon as Sungjin hits the button, I’m consumed in a wild brightness and I see  _ everything _ : me, Wonpil, and Dowoon riding our jet sleds down the sand, Dowoon playing dirty and throwing a light grenade into Wonpil’s engine, Wonpil jumping off in time and laughing that high-pitched, maniacal laugh as he lands on the back of Dowoon’s sled. Me, feeling that swell of pride the first time I was allowed onto one of the jagers--and then, there’s a searing, blinding pain and the white light is replaced by a glowing darkness, an illuminated shadow, and I know what’s coming.

Brian’s memories rip through mine: there’s the ocean, waves lapping at my ankles. A loud, piercing scream against the backdrop of the roaring ocean. Metal, ripping from metal. A kaiju’s claw tearing through the jager’s body. A flash of platinum blonde hair--a hand slipping from a hand.  _ BriBri!  _ A grief so sharp I can’t breathe. I feel my body stiffen, hear myself scream along to the memory like some bad version of karaoke.

And then warmth, a voice in my ear. 

_ You can say no. You can tap out and Sungjin hits the button and this stops.  _

I glance to my right. Brian in the other helmet eyebrows furrowed in concentration. The darkness takes on a roundness, a containedness to it. I blink.  _ He’s trying to control it. _

_ Yup.  _

_ Oh. Sorry. Forgot about the mind-reading thing. _

_ It’s fine. Just call it quits so we can get on with our days. Roast beef at the caf today. _

_ Let the memory go. _

_ What? _

_ Stop controlling it. I fucking told you I can take it, I can take it. _

Brian meets my gaze.

_ You’re insane. _

I find myself grinning despite the pain. He’s surprised. I shrug.

_ Maybe I am.  _

The pain slaps me like a metal gauntlet to the unarmored gut. The grief feels like I’m being torn apart from the inside. My face is wet and I know it’s not from the memory. I’m crying because Brian is crying. And then the brightness turns another color and I’m in a field, the sky bleeding gold, a boy with platinum blonde hair flipping his shades up onto his head as he hands Brian a beer. 

_ What’s good, Bribri? Bitter you couldn’t beat me at flight drills? _

Brian’s laugh, clear as a bell.

_ You wish. _

The memory crackles against my skin. I feel tenderness sear through my chest, fondness filling every fiber of my being.

_ He was your bestfriend.  _

_ Is,  _ Brian corrects me.  _ And always will be.  _

_ I understand.  _ I touch the memory softly as if it were my own.

And then Sungjin pulls the plug and everything goes black.

  
  


The first thing I see when I wake up is the infirmary clock. It reads 09:08 PM in red, blocky numerics. I feel a flood of disappointment: if there’s one thing I know about drifting, it’s that you’re not supposed to fuckin’ black out after. 

“You alright, Captain?” Sungjin asks as he pushes the door open.

I nod, sitting up. “Yeah. I mean, I guess. For someone who blacked out for twelve hours.”

Sungjin lets out a small laugh, hands me a tetra pack of orange juice. “Drink up.”

I punch the straw through the small, aluminum hole and take a long sip, my lips dry and chapped, stinging at first contact with the cool liquid. I flinch.

“So I guess that’s a no to me co-piloting the Jane Danger, huh--” 

“--I wouldn’t say that.” Brian Kang walks in, his backpack slung over one shoulder, his sleeping pack tucked under one arm. 

“Right,” I say, unsure how to act after being in such close contact with...well, him. “How would you phrase my failure, then?”

“Who says you failed?”

I frown. “What are you--” 

I get hit in the face with fabric and it takes me a moment to realize what it is. _It's not his sleeping pack._ It's a jacket. Black and green leather, dragon with its wings spread out emblazoned across the back. 

“--we train at 4:00 AM at the main stadium. Don’t be late.”


	2. They Say "Don't Go"

“What?” Wonpil says, less a question, more to express his utter disbelief. “What do you mean you’re meeting him at the main stadium in the morning?”

I grin, savoring every bit of smugness that I can before the real, actual terror sets in--because _what the fuck does it mean that I’m meeting him at the main stadium in the morning._ I clink my beer against Wonpil’s.

“Like I said.” I take a swig, setting my beer down on the counter with a definitive thump. “I did the drift test with Kang today and he said we’d start training in the morning.”

“You mean you passed out for twelve hours and are the only other person next to Kang masochistic enough to put yourself through that kind of shit.” Dowoon puts his bag down next to Wonpil before planting a soft kiss on Wonpil’s forehead and ordering himself a whiskey-coke.

“It’s just Unli-PDA with you two forever,” I say, rolling my eyes. “Remember back when you two idiots were still in denial and were going with the ‘we’re just best friends’ angle? I kind of liked that better than all this smooching.”

“Don’t change the subject,” Wonpil says, fixing his eyes on me. The thing about Kim Wonpil is we drifted once when we were six, in a DIY drift pod we found in one of the dune garages and I swear to god some bit of him never came back from that because he always seems to know what I’m thinking. “Why didn’t you tell me you fainted?”

I shrug. “Doesn’t everyone faint after being plugged into a traumatic memory of someone feeling their co-pilot being ripped limb from limb?”

“No,” Dowoon says, downing his drink. “Most people die.”

  
  


I get zero sleep so I’m at the main stadium an hour and a half early--but surprise, surprise, Brian Kang’s there even earlier. I walk in and he’s already doing drills, shadow-boxing as the gym’s automated lazers rain down on him. He dodges every ray with a strange fluidity given his broad shoulders, the width of his frame. He dodges the last lazer beam and runs up over the barrier before doing a flip and landing crouched, sweat dripping from the tip of his nose, the ends of his dark hair which he proceeds to slick back.

_Show off._

“You were taking a while so I decided to go ahead and start.” He gets up and walks to one of the small tables where he’s stashed his gear. His shirt is black but even then I can tell it’s wet from the way it clings to his body. He twists open his water bottle, takes a long drink before pouring the rest of the water on himself.

“You’re making a mess.” I say, dropping my things on the sidelines and slipping on my training shoes, wrapping my hands slowly. “You’re going to be really easy to take down if you’re slipping on your feet.”

He grins, flaps them hem of shirt which shows off the line of his torso where it disappears into the waistband of his training pants. “You never heard of dry fit, Ace?”

I let out a small laugh. “Shut up. Let’s train.”

 

 

“Do you feel that?” Brian Kang says into my ear as he has me in a chokehold. I’m breathless, straining for air as he holds me against him, my back flush against his chest. “That’s your bloodflow slowing--the vision goes first, always, that blackness at the edges of everything. And then it’ll be sound and you’ll have to learn to know what I mean by the pattern of my lips, the shape of the word--”

His lips tickle the shell of my ear before my hearing goes.

I reach down, palm skimming against the flesh of his pelvis before I find what I’m looking for. With what strength I have left, I grab his belt and pull. When his arms come away, I duck and throw my weight behind throwing him down. He lands on the floor and the mat is the first thing I hear, the sound of him against it sending my ears ringing.

He grins and as he falls, his hand finds the cuff of my sleeve and I tumble after him but find my footing in time. I straddle him, holding him down with one hand on his throat, the other on his wrist.

“--and you’re going to have to learn to stop talking--”

“--as should you, Ace.” He slips a leg under my left knee and I’m pinned face down, an arm behind me. Again, his breath hot against the shell of my ear. “I know I’m pretty, but try not to enjoy being on top of me too much. Eyes on the prize.”

I writhe but to no avail--and he knows it. I can _hear_ him grinning.

“Shut up.” My hand grips his shirt uselessly. “And stop fucking calling me Ace.”

“Tap out first, Ace.”

“Over my dead body, Kang.”

“Kang??? That’s the best you could do, Ace?” He pulls on my arm and pain shoots from my elbow to my shoulder.

“Fuck--”

I reach out with my free hand and tap.

He lets go.

“You’re crazy,” I say, flopping on my back, breathless.

He grins. “So are you, Ace.”

“Don’t call me that.” I take a swig from my bottle of water. “What does that even _mean_?”

“I’ll call you whatever I want, Captain.”

I’m out-ranked and he knows it.

“Whatever you say.”

I blink, watch Brian as he leans back, eyebrows furrowed together as he lets the stadium airconditioning cool his face. I can see why people would be afraid of him, why people would refuse to co-pilot. I can see how people could die trying.

He meets my eye, smiles. I smile back, the gesture feeling odd on my face. For someone whose bestfriend is Kim Wonpil, you think I would’ve learned to do things like make friends by now.

“Ace is a compliment.”

“Right.”

“Lesson number one,” Brian says. “Know when you’re beat. When we’re out there, we’re going to be so in each other’s heads we’re not going to know where one ends and the other begins. So you’re going to have to let some of it go.”

I nod. “Right. Sorry about that. I guess I kind of have--err, I mean, I don’t like--you know--not being in control of things--”

“--of course.” He shrugs. “Only someone like that would be drift compatible with someone like me.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

He grins. “We’re going to be stuck with each other for a couple of months. You’ll find out eventually.”

I roll my eyes. “You think you’re _so_ mysterious.”

He lets out a peal of laughter and for a moment he looks like a different person--more like the person from that golden memory, that person with all the ease of someone who doesn’t yet know the difficult things to come. And just like that, it’s gone.

“Right.” He gets to his feet. “Hey, I just want to make one thing clear and I hope you don’t take it the wrong way.”

“What’s that?”

“Co-piloting is going to require us to spend time together and we’ll be friendly--that’s a necessity. It’s the nature of the beast. And I’m sure that you’re going to go a long way with your skills and as a mentor, I can be proud of you. But this is the barrier that I’m going to set now, at the very fucking beginning so no one gets hurt. We’re not going to be friends. And if you have any ideas about romance, squash them out now. I know you’re friends with Lieutenant Kim and Captain Yoon and that happens for some people but that’s not what’s going to happen here. Love, friendship--those things aren’t in the cards for me anymore.”

I blink, not quite sure why it feels like someone’s slapped me. Not that I was thinking of him that way. _I think._

“You really like yourself, huh.”

He grins, reaching down to help me up. “On the contrary, Ace. I hate myself.”

And with that, he hits the switch on the console and the light rains down from the ceiling.


End file.
